Alexandra will get an A in class but Amber won’t. At least, that’s what their peers expect, according to a small new study of the meanings encoded in people’s names.

“The name you give your kid is sort of a proxy for a whole bunch of things in our culture,” study researcher John Waggoner of Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania told LiveScience. Names have been linked to many life choices, including what kind of work people do and how they donate to charity.

Previous studies have shown that what people name their children varies by their socioeconomic status and education level. Waggoner and his colleagues wondered if people’s names affect what others expect of them.